Word: dakotas
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Bentsen likes to say that he speaks without a Texas accent because his forebears came from Denmark by way of South Dakota. But his family fortune definitely speaks the language of Texas. His father, Lloyd Bentsen Sr., and his Uncle Elmer started buying land and reselling it in ways that brought accusations, though little proof, of shady business practices. From real estate, the family moved into farming, cattle raising, oil drilling, banking. Today Bentsen Sr. is worth an estimated $50 million. The candidate puts his own assets at $2.3 million, all of it currently placed in a blind trust...
Near the beginning of this great Midwestern journey, Charles Neumiller supervises the home burial of his father Otto, a German Catholic immigrant who had carved an honest farm out of the unyielding North Dakota plains. Near the end, Charles himself dies and is mourned by new generations of Neumillers. Between these obituary landmarks, Charles' son Martin marries, raises a family of five reasonably normal children, moves from North Dakota to Illinois and loses his wife to uremia. That is, in effect, the whole story. The plot of Beyond the Bedroom Wall could easily fit into half a nutshell...
...collage of preserved sensations: the "bleached, bleak infinity" of mid-America, where afternoon light fades "as though tilting over in the air toward the sun, which then draws it forward and out"; a crystalline day of fishing on a Minnesota lake; brave old houses that shudder at North Dakota blizzards but withstand them. As fondly as an oldtimer, Woiwode, 33, compares the merits of long-forgotten tractor brands (the Hart Parr, Waterloo Boy, Rumley Oil Pull) and stocks a winter larder as it was in the days before home freezers: "The potato bin was full. There were parsnips, kohlrabi, turnips...
...Bedroom Wall demonstrates a fine talent for description, coupled with a Proustian ability to re-create the past. Much of Woiwode's fiction seems knit from the strands of his own life. Like the fourth generation of Neumiller children, the Manhattan-based Woiwode was born in North Dakota and spent part of his childhood in rural Illinois. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1964, he began selling articles and short stories to magazines. His first novel, What I'm Going to Do, I Think (1969) was an eerie portrait of modern marriage and its betrayals...
...produce high fever, convulsions and coma; those under one year of age who survive an infection are likely to have permanent brain damage. So far this year WEE has struck hundreds of horses and killed six of its 9 human victims in the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota...